Poker Pros Lead Computer ‘Claudico’ by $165K After Weekend In Brains Vs. AI

Man ruled the weekend vs. machines, as a quartet of poker pros took a decent lead in a competition against a poker-playing computer.

The team of Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Jason Les and Bjorn Li held an advantage of $165K (in fake money, not real money) over Claudico, a no-limit heads-up hold’em program developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The pros are playing the computer in an 80,000-hand challenge, a competition called “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence.”

So far, 16,500 hands have been played against Claudico. Li is up $180K for the competition, and Polk is up $145K. Les is down $117K, and Kim is down $41K. The $165K margin is hardly an insurmountable lead in heads-up NLHE, with less than 25 percent of the hands completed. The real question is the computer’s ability to adapt to the human opponents’ style, which its AI is supposed to be able to do.

You can check out our Viewers’ Guide here. Polk’s feed and the updating scoreboard appear below.

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